SPEAK OUT: School polices make it hard to develop love of reading

COMMENTARY – A deeply-rooted love for reading is one of the most important things to cultivate in a student.

Reading teaches us about the world and exposes us to ideas that would never have been presented in our daily lives. It helps us grow our knowledge base, improve our writing and speech, and develop ourselves as thinking beings. There is evidence linking strong reading skills in childhood to greater intelligence levels as a young adult.

And yet, with everything so strongly in favor of reading, school policies stand in the way of students developing a love for it.

Throughout the school year and over the summer, teachers assign books that students often find uninteresting, or resent as being chosen for them. I would love to see more reading assignments centered around a student’s individual interests to encourage them to seek out literature they truly enjoy experiencing. If this isn’t possible, I’d like to see more books chosen that fit into the category of classics.

Classics tend to be the very height of quality writing. Of course, some students dislike the wordiness, awkward language, or style of writing in classics. I find this unfortunate, because if you can get past all of those things you will discover a whole world of books that have been fawned over by generations of bibliophiles.

Many of the books chosen for students are relatively new literature such as “The Gospel According to Larry” or “Into the Wild.” Don’t get me wrong, these are valid reading choices for young adults, but they are, in my opinion, boring and uninspired.

Books like these do not grow a student’s love for reading. Books like these only reinforce a dislike that has been present for years. I have friends who have never read a book in their lives that was not assigned by a teacher.

I look back over the classics that line my shelf, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Brothers Karamazov,” the work of Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others. I can’t help but wonder how different my peers would be if they had embarked on the same journey as countless intellectuals in days past.

Jamison MacFarland is a junior at Marshfield High School. Submit your Speak Out of no more than 400 words to editpage@ledger.com.